PSCR awards $38.5 million in public-safety-communications research grants

Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) announces that $38.5 million in grants have been awarded to fund 33 research-and-development projects that are designed to help determine future possibilities in a variety of first-responder communications technologies.

SAN ANTONIO—Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) yesterday announced that $38.5 million in grants have been awarded to fund 33 research-and-development projects that are designed to help determine future possibilities in a variety of first-responder communications technologies.

When PSCR initially unveiled its plans for the Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program, the initial goal was to fund $30 million worth of multi-year research projects—money that was available as part of a $300 million allocation from the proceeds of the FCC’s AWS-3 auction. However, PSCR officials decided to expand the total grant support after reviewing the research proposals submitted by the end of February, according to PSCR Division Chief Dereck Orr.

“We just got that many good applications,” Orr said yesterday during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We got 162 [applications], which far exceeded our expectations—I think we were thinking about 100. We got so many more than we expected, so many of them were really unique and compelling, and we have the money, so we took advantage of the opportunity and funded the ones we thought were compelling.”

According to a press release from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—the parent organization for PSCR—the 162 proposals were submitted by a diverse pool of national and international applicants across industry, academia, and public-safety organizations. The 33 selected projects address the following five key technology areas:

During opening remarks at the PSCR Stakeholder Meeting, Orr said he was encouraged by the response and the opportunity to use the program to expand dramatically the number of people conducting research in the public-safety-communications arena.

With this in mind, several of the research projects plan to create open-source testing and research tools that will be generally accessible, so it will be easier to expand the community developing potential solutions for first responders, Orr said.

“We really wanted to create some underlying research capabilities that will generate and propagate even more research moving forward,” Orr said. “There’s a dearth of research tools for people to use who are interested in developing applications, services and new capabilities for public-safety systems, because not everybody can go own an LTE network.

“What some of these awardees and grantees are doing is they’re going to create some of the open-source tools where people will be able to simulate having a network and be able to design new applications and services, as well as innovate in an LTE network and around an LTE network without having the infrastructure. We’re creating this base that only will allow us to do more research on top of that and bring more people in the space of innovating for public safety.”

Representatives from many of the selected projects are presenting their research plans this week during the PSCR Stakeholder Meeting. Additional details may be found on the Public Safety Communications Research website. Below is a table with all awardees, a provided in the NIST press release: